Haruki Murakami Quotes

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.

Everybody has a story... and a scream.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

If a bell failed to ring, if a stove smoked, if a wheel on a machine stuck, you knew at once where to look and did so with alacrity; you found the defect and knew how to cure it. But the thing within you, the secret mainspring that alone gave meaning to life, the thing within us that alone is living, alone is capable of feeling pleasure and pain, of craving happiness and experiencing it- that was unknown. You knew nothing about that, nothing at all, and if the mainspring failed there was no cure. Wasn't it insane?

Ten thousand million nightmares, temptation by the score, I used to get so high, and still I wanted more. You think my time is wasted in search of who I am, I tried so hard to kill the boy inside the man.

She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.

This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her...This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen... Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.

Modern life. Where are we running? Sometimes what we want is not always where we are... Are we alone? Is the real winter inside our hearts? We are all struggling for definition in a world that resists our increase.

All through the night, she battled herself. Or battled to know herself. She fell apart and then put herself back together and then she fell apart again and put herself back together, over and over.

I’ve been feeling something else. Like I’m about to be sucked into something powerful and painful.

People are running, running, but there is no place in the world to which they can flee to escape themselves. Ultimately, each one must face himself.

Life, after all, was a secret with the self. The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center--that center which she coveted for herself and recognized instantly in others. Fruits had it, the very heart of, say, a cherry, where the true worth and flavor lay. Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many, in fact.

There's such a fierce intense fire burning inside of me, so much that it just wants to explode.

Significance is about who we are before it is about what we do.

Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

All these feelings need to be felt. We need to stomp and storm; to sob and cry; to perspire and tremble.

We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart- Lady Gaga 10/22/10

Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else.

He bit the inside of his cheek, Death purring wildy. The pleasure of her touch, even one so innocent, rocked him to the core.

I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.

I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.